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AJ_Lounes t1_it48qar wrote

Reply to comment by MoreanSwordsman in Was there mass migration of Roman citizens from Western Empire to Eastern Empire during degredation and after fall of Western part of empire. by [deleted]

In a way, yes. The roman power ran out of recognition and prestige with time. One of the strenght of the Empire through its History was obviously its military. But it also became its weakness during the fall. There are 2 main things to remember when it comes to this :

  • Very often, the peoples located on lands the Empire would conquer didn't necessarily pay their tribute with money but with men who would join the military. It was at the time win-win for the Romans. Not only it was growing their ranks but it was also automatically preventing the conquered to make up a new armed force. On the barbarian perspective, joining the roman army was giving them the opportunity of eventually gaining ranks and perhaps lands, and even citizenship.
  • That leads immediately to the second point. Lands. Recognized and respected soldiers were given lands by the government. They were not the absolute rulers of their lands, the Emperor was obviously willing to remain the top leader over its territory, but those soldiers with property still had some liberty. Looking at History, such a system can only work when the initial power is strong. Which was not the case during the empire's last century. The Empire got more and more fragmented.

But that's only for the political part. Culturally, the Romans inprint remained in Europe and was respected by the barbarians. When the barbarians rulers arrived with their courts and nobles, they knew that the main people was remaining roman. According to some (rare) testimonies which arrived to us, they understood they needed to work with the people already settled in good terms. One of the best example for this might be the Franks.

According to quite some historians, we might want to thank Christianism for this whole process of (not full, but still) preservation. The barbarian rulers understood they needed the roman people. The roman people was responding positively to the Church. So the barbarian needed the Church. And the Church needed strong protective rulers who eventually all got baptized. The Church ultimately gained power (it was the Franks who actually recognized first the Vatican as a state and well, the Vatican was in a way benefiting of Rome's aura) and more and more churches and cathedrals were built, which also led more or less directly to the preservation of some Ancient texts and works which were also rewritten in churches' offices.

And as we've discussed above, many rulers, even hundreds of years after the Fall, had in mind to restore the glory of the old Empire which was still seen as a wonder.

To conclude : the Fall of the Western Empire was the fall of its political system. But not of its people, culture or infrastructures. Sure, time did its work, adjustments were made here and there, romans and barbarians shared couches, but the whole presence and aura of the Empire was still there.

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MoreanSwordsman t1_it4p62v wrote

First, thank you very much for this productive input. I got a question: So why was the Roman infrastructure and architectural culture destroyed gradually? When you go to Rome today, you hardly can find a complete temple. Even the well known Forum Romanum is nothing more than a few stone blocks..

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AJ_Lounes t1_it4vorx wrote

Thanks ! It is true the preservation is quite different from one thing to another. There are a bit of various reasons. Time is obviously one of them but not only. It happened sometimes that in order to build other monuments or support economy or war effort in troubled times that some monuments or places actually got destroyed to recycle the materials.

I imagine also that more modern conflicts could have damaged some places. Also, I don't remember precisely the place name, but I believe Mussolini actually ordered the destruction of old buildings to clear space and build a massive street through Rome.

If we look on the brightside however, we do have some monuments such as the Coliseum or the Pantheon which have made it quite good so far despite a few damages here and there. If we think also about the main roads paved by the romans, we are in a way still using some to this day technically, but obviously they're under concrete now..

I would also add that due to the fragmented political power and emergence of brand new regimes across Europe that the places of power changed of location too and so, I guess, the money allowed to maintain certain buildings in good shape.

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Peter_deT t1_it5sxv4 wrote

Squared stone blocks are expensive to make. Cheaper and easier to take them from some abandoned building. Rome went from maybe 500,000 plus to 20,000 over two centuries, and stayed at 20,000 for several centuries more. Basically a mid-size town in the middle of a large field of ruins.

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outsidenorms t1_it50mch wrote

As rome unwound, plebeians would take marble and stone from the colosseum to sell for food. This after a full year of no sun, a plague, and hardly any food. Other sites were just ignored as it was too expensive to maintain. The church came in and rebuilt but in their vision.

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aphilsphan t1_it56qva wrote

I always think of the symbolic end of Rome as 660. Constans II comes over from Constantinople. He visits Rome which after all is still part of his empire. He walks around marveling at the glories done centuries ago. Rome has only about 50k people at this point, just the Papal bureaucracy really. It isn’t even the capital of Byzantine Italy. That’s Ravenna.

He orders his men to strip all the remaining precious metal gilding from the monuments. He even takes all the copper.

Then no Roman Emperor returns until the 15th century, unless you count Charlemagne and tue HRE.

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outsidenorms t1_it5eojg wrote

This is where I start to get sad…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Rome_(410)

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aphilsphan t1_it7r6un wrote

Historians used to think of 410 as almost a rowdy tourist visit. I’m not sure that’s true anymore. It was the Vandals in 455 that really ruined things, then Belisarius versus the Ostrogoths and Lombards that did the coup de grace. But if you think about it, in 405 the Danube and Rhine frontiers are leaking but they are still there and 5 years later the Visigoths are in Rome. Very sad.

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clovis_227 t1_it52048 wrote

The new barbarian kingdom let taxation slip, since their armies were mostly landed now, not paid. Moreover, the aristocracy in the west became much more rural. Finally, there was a greater focus on churches and monasteries instead of the usual civil infrastructure.

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aphilsphan t1_it563u8 wrote

They didn’t so much let taxation slip as they inherited a system of taxes in kind. The money economy was going away. It becomes much harder to rebuild a needed aqueduct for a city 500 miles away when you can’t pay the workers from the surplus you’ve got elsewhere. All you can do are smaller projects using your local surpluses.

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